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Identity

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November 11, 2012
Art, Learning, Process, Reflection, Zen
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I am a fictional character you make up.

I am a fictional character I make up.

I was going to write about a dream that I recently had, and my analysis of the dream, which led to an understanding of something that I considered a useful principle. Something that I had realized as I jotted down and thought about my dream. I felt reluctant to post the details of the dream and analysis here because it contains things that felt “private”, and that led to further thoughts about privacy and identity. The principle is that, what I say to you, “the world,” will become attached to my identity. You assume that, because I am writing in the first person and describing something as if it happened to me, that it is truth, even if the “thing that happened to me” was a dream, vaguely recalled, and that what happened after that was my analysis of the dream. Idle thoughts. Idle visions. Dreams are just thinking. Interesting that absolutely nothing physical happened in the world (apart from particles moving around in my head, and fingers typing on a keyboard). But we become attached to thought. Why is that? “This person had this thought, therefore she is such and such a kind of person.” This is understandable, too, because thought can turn into action. What people say reflects what they think. What they think affects what they might do. A great deal of the way we feel about people is due to the ideas they express. We are overly attached to the creation and management of a self-image, perhaps because we over-value our selves. Yet, it’s hard to see how things could be different.

I thought about how authors of works of fiction were much more free of this particular constraint. If I were writing a novel, I could have my protagonist describe a dream he had had. I could have my fictional protagonist post a fictional dream (on a fictional worldwide network, on a fictional planet…) Or kill someone. Or do something embarrassing. Readers could think what they wanted about the character, but the character “himself” is completely free of concern. He has no future. He has no past. He is completely static and unchanging, embedded in an imaginary world.

What does that imaginary world represent? And how are we all that different? We may like the character, or we may not. He may be a hero or a villain. We imbue him with identity in our imaginations. We want this or that to happen to him. A good writer will “bring a character to life.” But the character himself is not alive. If he dies, we may feel disappointed, or even sad. But we can take a step back and recognize that the emotion is for something inanimate, not real. We have invested the character and the story with personal meaning, but we realize it’s a story, just like any story, which reflects varying amounts of reality. What reality is specifically reflected is not stated directly by the story. It’s up to the reader to find personal relevance, and to let the story advance meaningful thought through its alignment with aspects of reality.

A good fiction writer is drawing from life experience, from some real understanding of the shared reality we all inhabit, otherwise her stories would be uninteresting. Therefore the protagonist’s dreams, thoughts, actions may reflect real dreams, thoughts, actions experienced by the author. Or may simply be real dreams or episodes described accurately from the author’s life. We often say that a novel is “autobiographical” if it reflects a great deal of that reality. But even then, there is that freedom enjoyed by fiction authors, which is the intentional mystery within the writing, because the writing is meant to communicate truth, not to be truth. A story is therefore a space within which to explore ideas, whose consequences are not tightly bound to particular real people in the real world.

(One of my favorite books is Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins, which is said to be the author’s most autobiographical work. Clearly almost every aspect of the rollicking and fanciful story is fiction, but a certain personality is conveyed by the protagonist’s dreams, thoughts and actions: A fictional personality which is supposedly similar to Robbins’ own “fictional” personality.)

When we think further about this, there are many kinds of stories. Fables. Allegories. Allegories which characterize real people, and which have real effects. And all stories, we could say, are things that we learn at least small things from. So of course, the concept of “fiction” is not so simple.

But my points are these: (a) My own identity, in your mind, is a mental construct. That’s not too novel of an idea; it’s easy to realize it. You could probably conceive of the idea of “waking up” from this reality and realizing it was all a dream… (b) Likewise, my own identity in my own mind is also a construct, but a much “bigger” one, a realer one, to me than is anybody else’s identity. That this “I” I experience is a fiction is also not a new concept, even though it’s something I might talk about, at great length, some other time. (We have no reference points, like “waking up from a dream,” for understanding that “I” is the same thing– a construct of the mind. What if you woke up from a dream and your “I” wasn’t there? Or was somebody else’s “I”? Assuming you blinked your eyes all the memories in your head suddenly changed to someone else’s, how would you even know it? Interesting things to talk about, but why not try to experience them? My understanding thus far is that pursuing such experiences are one goal of Zen practice. I had a momentary experience in which my “I” disappeared. It was just for a few seconds, and it wasn’t particularly shocking. I was meditating by concentrating outwards and all of a sudden there was no “I”. Yet nothing else had changed.)

Finally: (c) We play with the concept of identity all the time. We drink to shrink it, to become less attached to it, to inhibit our worries about its preservation. We watch movies and plays and read books to conjure up different identities. We wear costumes or just different styles of clothing. We meditate to try and detach from identity, to become more (and ultimately completely) free of its constraints. Identity is of very great concern to ego; I would guess that the solid awareness of “I” is a “module” in the brain which is used by the ego in its modeling. And we dream. Dreams do funny things with identity.

Back to my dream. Let’s say I’m free of identity. I will say what I want, as if this “I” is the “I” in a novel; I am not attached to it. This is what I jotted down soon after waking up, so the grammar is not my best.

I’m on a bus. A number of us will be riding together, and we want to sit at a table. There are tables on this bus, and a few chairs. At first we spot a table on the ground floor, but then we move to the upstairs area. We find a table, but there are not going to be enough chairs, since one or two more people will be joining us. I go downstairs and ask some women if I can borrow a chair (it’s actually more like a cushion) from their area; I say that if someone comes and needs a chair, I’ll immediately bring it back. They seem a little skeptical and try to tease me a little or give me a hard time, but eventually just let me take the chair. I trip on something on my way out of their area, and bring the chair upstairs.

I’m drawing something with solid lines; a woman is watching along with some other people. I think we’re upstairs now. I take out a ball-point pen which has a thicker ball at its tip and go to make a drop of ink/paint (it’s a paint pen) inside an enclosed area lower down on the drawing, and because the paint in the pen touches the boundary of the surrounding ink, the surface tension of the paint bead breaks and becomes an ugly blob; I no longer have the thin white border of the paper around the paint bead I’d wanted. I shrug to the woman, saying oh well, look what I just did to my drawing… I guess that’s what’s expected when you try to use “paint pens” for something so delicate. I try to put a humorous spin on it to show that I know what I’m doing but that there are just some inherently hard materials, so that even though I’m confident in my abilities, it won’t always come out perfectly. For fun I continue to manipulate the paint bead, adding more paint, “messing up” my drawing because it’s ruined, but I’m just playing / experimenting. What starts happening is that I’m building up an object in three dimensions. The bead becomes larger and larger until it turns into a ball; it is semi-dry and gel-like; it feels like very soft rubber with a just-cured house-paint-like surface. I manipulate the bead and now I’m creating an abstract 3-D weird teddy-bear-like thing, maybe five inches tall. I show it to the woman and say something about the novelty of this. I’m impressed by what’s coming out: this giant “gummy bear,” but not exactly that. Earlier on, I’d commented that I’ve never done anything like this before, and I now have a sense of wonder as the thing is developing, as in, wow, I never knew you could do this with these paint pens! The woman is intrigued, too. I feel attracted to her; she’s cute but feels out of my reach at this point, since I’ve only recently met her. For some reason I feel a wave of attraction and confidence, perhaps triggered by her admiration of my skill and absorption towards the weird thing I’m doing, the experimental nature of it, the demonstration of confidence and skill. I need to look at something behind her, and in doing so put my face close to hers and kiss her near her mouth, just the very corners of our mouths touching. I have the thought, in a flash, that she would welcome a real kiss now, but I decide to wait, to go back to what I was doing, to not break that absorption. I feel good because now I’m much closer to this woman, there is possibility of a deeper connection forming, but I don’t want to focus on that now; I still want to focus on following the art and take her on a journey somewhere, not merely declare that this is the destination. I want to remain in concentration on this creative process and what it represents, to draw her admiration out, deepen it, make the connection more real. I’m not just an artistic man who momentarily wowed her, rather I’m a real being with depth who can sustain this level of curiosity and inquiry over a long period of time. We turn back to the art, together.

Analysis: Confidence in oneself is a very attractive thing, perhaps the most attractive thing, and an aspect of a romantic relationship which is possibly the most important to me is where a woman is attracted to me because of my true confidence and abilities. It takes artistic skill to win her over. Confidence exists in performing artistic activities without fear, demonstrating ability as a side-effect. Good qualities are shown here: curiosity. Fearlessness. So much fear exists in art, but why? But it’s fear of the unknown. Fear of experimental art forms, of fully engaging curiosity and doing something out of one’s own box, which is also society’s box. We are drawn to people who do what is new and novel and challenge our existing conceptions of what is possible with what they have done and will do. There is a certain freshness, qualities of mind of youth, that exist here. Many people can be curious and creative, but their products are often not worth much in the eyes of time: they are constrained by existing forms, by the need to make things that fit in with accepted patterns. I want to be curious and simply not care, which will result in the creation of products of greater value, while still being surprised by what is coming out, because they are generated by a deeper part of me, one that I do not control. So I do not look at myself or admire myself. There is no ego, no joy in identity. I simply create; my body and mind are the things that create, but I am not them. And that draws the admiration of others. This feedback loop makes me want to be my best. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you do not win. But in the process, you always win. And we can never expect that what we create is going to be the same as before. It’s always new. It’s important to do what is difficult, so that our mistakes can be guided into what is new and valuable. To have the confidence to keep going, even after a so-called mistake, just for curiosity’s sake, to see what it will turn into.

There are layers, here. These are the thoughts of my changing “I”, in this small moment.

Boggle Training

By
January 24, 2008
Boggle, Learning, Zen
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How about this? You’re presented with a page displaying a Boggle grid, and the solver generates both all possible words, and all possible words as if the board were jittered about in several ways. Our training program now has two lists of words, one of which is the list of words which actually exist, and another is a list of words which almost exist, but not quite. You’re presented one-at-a-time with a randomly-ordered mix of words from both lists, and your task is to classify words into “valid” and “invalid” based on whether they can be found on the board you see. This might take a great deal of thought at first, but ought to start becoming somewhat automatic at some point, as your brain rewires itself to be good at finding specific words in Boggle grids. It seems to me that this should improve performance in the game, without the “searching… searching…” dead time that occurs when actually playing, while the subconscious does its stuff.

Not that this is inherently useful; it’s just a mental-exercise sort of thing. In general I think there’s a very large benefit to the task of learning anything which can be realized by taking complex tasks and breaking them down into the simplest sub-tasks, which can then be drilled. Once each sub-task is mastered, specific sub-tasks can be combined and then drilled at the same time, in different combinations, until the complex skill as a whole comes together and seems like second nature. Because our brains are inherently poor at context-switching, it’s better to train each skill in as narrowly-focused a manner as possible. For example, I can play Tetris for hours and not really have to think– I’ve “automaticized” playing the game. The same goes for shifting gears in a manual-transmission car. Pianists don’t need to figure out how the notes in a musical score map to keys on the keyboard, they just know and play. (It’s said that Bach, I believe (or some other classical composer) was able to actually hear music while merely looking at a score.) And the same goes for many activities. Like typing. I think of the words I want to express, and my fingers automatically know where to go to press the right keys on the keyboard to emit them.

What if I were to turn my keyboard upside-down? How long would it take me to learn to type anywhere close to my current speed? Would the new positioning of the spacebar interfere with whatever speed I could attain, or would I begin to adapt to it pretty well? How long would it take?

What if everyday when I arrived at work, my keyboard (right-side-up, again, for the sake of sanity), had a new, randomized arrangement of keys? Could I learn how to learn a new keyboard layout very quickly and then begin typing at a decent speed on this new, randomized keyboard layout in a short amount of time? Interesting to ponder (as I lie awake and wonder).

Back to the piano example. I’d prefer to drill “mapping notes on a musical staff to their corresponding keys”, until I can essentially do that without thinking. Then I’ll move on to quickly reading rhythms. Then I’ll move on to playing chords. Throughout this, I can work on exercises that deal with reading/playing different notes with both hands, simultaneously. And finally, I can put it all together.

Contrast the above with the typical way of learning piano. The student starts with exceedingly simple pieces, tries to master them, and then moves on. But I find that once I know a simple piece well enough to have mastered it, I’m not reading the notes any more, I’m just playing by following the muscle memory which produces the song. What I really want is to learn how to read the notes, and mastering simple pieces is not the way to do that. Hard pieces, on the other hand, are too daunting to learn notes from. What’s a poor overly-idealistic piano student to do?

So I’ve had a lot of fun recently playing Rock Band for the X-Box. If the level of satisfaction which comes from learning complicated drum rhythms or button presses on the fake guitar could be built into a system for learning how to play a real piano keyboard, think how much easier it would be to learn, and how much more progress young kids who have hours of piano lessons foisted upon them would make. (I say this from personal experience, having had piano lessons for a couple years when in elementary/high school. That I didn’t learn all that much from these lessons is both partly a matter of motivation (to practice, which was a chore to me, at the time, as much as I wish now that I had done so, back then), and a matter of how the subject was meant to be learned– by playing those simple songs, referenced above. I generally ended up playing by ear what the teacher had demonstrated, and so never became all that great at reading music). I know there was that Miracle Piano keyboard a while back, but that’s probably dated by today’s technological standards. Why not an X-Box game with a MIDI-to-USB adapter for plugging in a standard electronic keyboard? Does such a thing exist?